Summary

Description

Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines are a very foundational and fundamental resource in Cloud Computing. Deploying virtual machines gives you more flexibility and control over your cloud infrastructure and services, however, it also means you have more responsibility to maintain and configure these resources. This course gives you an overview of why use virtual machines as well as how to create, configure, and monitor VMs in Azure Resource Manager.

Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines: What You'll Learn

Lesson

What you'll learn

Overview

Overview of the course and the Learning Objectives

What is a Virtual Machine?

Understand what are Azure Virtual Machines and what workloads are ideal for VMs

Creating and Connecting to Azure VMs

Learn to deploy Windows and Linux VMs as well as how to connect to these VMs

Understand the basic concepts of Desired State Configuration and the options available to Azure VMs

Design and Implement VM Storage

Gain an understanding of the underlying Storage options available to VMs as well as Encryption

Configure Monitoring & Alerts for Azure VMs

Learn to monitor VMs in Azure Resource Manager as well as configure alerts.

Summary

Course summary and conclusion

Transcript

Currently we do not have any VMs in our Availability Set so let’s create a couple. First, there is one important thing you must understand. When VMs are placed into the same Availability set, they must share the same Virtual Network. I already have a virtual network, or VNet created called “ASVNet.” We’ll place our two new VMs on this VNet. The VMs do not need to be part of the same subnet, but as long as they are on any subnet within the same VNet then we’re okay. Also, be very mindful as to the Resource Group we chose for the Availability set as the VMs will have to be placed in the same Resource Group as the Availability set.

So let’s click on ‘+NEW’, type ‘2012 r2’, and hit [ENTER]. We’ll select Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter and click Create. We’ll call the first VM ASVM1 and fill out the rest of the details. This time we have SSD drives, so let’s select the DS1_v2 Standard VM Size. Again we are not going to use managed disks so we’ll leave that as ‘No’ for now. Again, for the virtual network, we want to select the VNet which we set aside for our Available set VMs. Now most importantly this time we’ll select High availability and choose our Availability set “AS1.” Let’s click OK, verify the summary screen details and click OK to begin our VM deployment.

Let’s click on Virtual Machines to view our VMs. Here you can see our newly created ASVM1. I’ve also went ahead and added two more VMs through the same process to create ASVM2 and ASVM3 virtual machines and place them in the same Availability set. So let’s take a look at our availability set. And there you have it, we have three VMs within our Availability set showing a status of Running. We can also see which Fault domain and Update domain our VMs are a part of. Without getting into too much detail here, we have 2 Fault domains and 5 Update domains configured, and so our Fault domains alternate between 0 and 1 while our Update domain goes from 0 to 4 back to 0 to 4, etc. to make up 5 update domains. This is how Azure automatically keeps track of which VMs belong to each domain respectively. Just remember, you may not move a VM from one Availability set to another. This would require you to delete and recreate the VM, which to be quite honest isn’t half as bad as it sounds since deleting a VM in Azure Resource Manager retains the disks, network interface, and PublicIPs associated with the VM to be used upon recreation.

About the Author

Chris has over 15 years of experience working with top IT Enterprise businesses. Having worked at Google helping to launch Gmail, YouTube, Maps and more and most recently at Microsoft working directly with Microsoft Azure for both Commercial and Public Sectors, Chris brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the team in architecting complex solutions and advanced troubleshooting techniques. He holds several Microsoft Certifications including Azure Certifications.

In his spare time, Chris enjoys movies, gaming, outdoor activities, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.